■ WITH some joking

that Omid Scobie couldn’t even lie straight in bed, a more forensic analysis of his investigative and imaginative talents comes from Philip Eade, author of Young Prince Philip: His Turbulent Early Life. ‘Apart, perhaps, from the Sussexes, [Scobie] doesn’t appear to have spoken to anyone who knows the people he’s claiming to have knowledge about,’ Eade tells me at the party held in Lady Amabel Lindsay’s house in Notting Hill to celebrate the new book Soldiers Don’t Go Mad, by war correspondent Charles Glass.

‘If you look in the acknowledgements [of Scobie’s book], there’s no one who works anywhere close to the Royal Family,’ says Eade. ‘None of his sources are named. Surprise, surprise.’